Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

In fairness to Joe Baugher, if each of his 92 gazillion listed aircraft had a record as detailed as the excellent one Sabrejet provided, he'd need another Internet. Also, a lot of his info comes from contributors to his site who appreciate his efforts to archive as many military aircraft as possible. I'm one of them and have sent him probably at least a hundred records through a number of years. Without such sites there'd be no record of many, many specific airplanes that men flew and, too often, died in.

In fairness Baugher's site isn't very detailed. The full (ish) history of this machine is thus:

F-86A-5 s/n 48-260 with construction number 43629.
Delivered 26 July 1949
Assigned to 4th Fighter Group 31 July 1949
To 334th FIS 15Aug50
Assigned to 4th FIW 14 September 1950
To 13th Aircraft Repair Sqn Kisarazu (Japan) 28 January 1952
To 6400th Air Depot Wing FEAMCOM 31 January 1952
To 4th FIW, Korea 20 February 1952
To 6400th ADW FEAMCOM 27 April 1952
To San Francisco Air Materiel Command 7 June 1952
To Sacramento Air Materiel Area, McClellan AFB CA 10 June 1952
To North American Aviation Fresno 11 August 1952
To 3595th Combat Crew Training Wing, Nellis AFB 26 May 1953
To Sacramento Air Materiel Area 7 January 1954
To 116th FIS Washington ANG 6 February 1954
To 195th FIS CA ANG (1954?) - though I think the above photo is with 115th FIS CA ANG.
To Boeing December 1957
To NASM 25 January 1962

This F-86, 48-260, saw combat against MiG-15s in Korea, flying most of its missions from Kimpo Air Base in Seoul. It was assigned to the 4th Fighter Wing, the first F-86 unit in Korea. At some point after its California Air National Guard service (dclark26's photo, above) it spent years at the Smithsonian's Paul Garber restoration facility in Maryland. Since 2005 it has been on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum near Dulles airport in Virginia. Here's a portion of a picture I took of it in 2009, showing its 48-260 serial number. Its history can be found on Joe Baugher's fantastic archive of U.S. military aircraft http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_serials/1946.html

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.